There are 8 million podcasts on the naked Web. Each week, I listen to 10 or more of them and write some reviews. Here’s the latest survey of independent audio featuring assorted nerds, geeks, freaks, mystics, fans and experts talking about the things they love. In the order I listened this week:
Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
Podcast Zeitgeist, Dec. 5
December 5, 2008From iPhones to the Stars, Ocarina Melodies
November 22, 2008
{Update! New List! New Post! See the new list of iPhone applications I actually still use in this post, from September 2009.]
For 99 cents I downloaded Ocarina, an app from Smule that turns an iPhone into a version of that ancient flute-like instrument. You press glowing “finger holes” on the touchscreen and blow into the microphone to play [Video].
That’s fun, but Ocarina does more than that. The app also uses the location software and a Google-Earth style globe to let you rotate the earth and listen to others play on their phones around the world. As they play one by one, visual images of the notes stream upward, as you watch from space. Around the globe, patches of glowing white show what are apparently concentrations of signals, particularly on the coasts of the United States and in Europe. One soloist sent a lonely tune up from an island of Hawaii.
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Third-Party iPhone Apps Update
November 22, 2008
{Update! New List! New Post! See the new list of iPhone applications I actually still use in this post, from September 2009.]
I’ve updated the post on “third-party iPhone apps I actually use,” which is inexplicably the most popular post on the blog. The much-improved Google mobile app, with voice-activated search, has moved to the top of the list. (To get it, you have to manually force an update at the iTunes store; it wasn’t happening automatically.) I download new free and cheap apps often, so if any of the new ones catch on, I will add them there.
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Podcast Zeitgesit, Nov. 13
November 13, 2008What I got out of this week’s podcasts for nerds and geeks:
Blogs I Actually Enjoy Reading
November 10, 2008I read blogs for my job. I used to read them for fun. There was a certain satisfaction circa 2002 in answering the question, “where did you hear that?” with the name of a blog the other person had never heard of, which by now is a blog that person is sick of reading. Of course, now dogs have blogs. Dogs. Have blogs. This is deplorable. One good thing about the old Internet was that we didn’t know they were dogs. And we thought they were fascinating.
Good blogs have a few things in common. They are the often the product of an obsession, or a collection of obsessions. They are reported. And, yes — well-curated links count as reporting. Good blogs are surprising. They are fresh. They break news. They are visually interesting. They make us laugh. They make us email our friends. They are sometimes deep. They update frequently. In other words, they are nothing like the lame personal blog you are reading.
The true test is whether you return. Here are 10 blogs that get my repeat business. That means their feeds are in my top folder in Google Reader, and I scroll through the headlines every day, even if I don’t read every post. They are not, generally, mean-spirited or political or full of opinion.
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Podcast Zeitgeist, Oct. 29
October 29, 2008Here are some impressions of the latest episodes from my current list of active podcasts. Topics covered included the election, the financial crisis, new Macs, Frank TV, your “Desert Island Sedaris,” Santa vs. Odin and a squid with a dog’s head that eats penguins at the South Pole.
In the order I listened this week:
Third-Party iPhone Apps I Actually Use
October 14, 2008
Update! New List! New Post! See the new list of iPhone applications I actually still use in this post, from September 2009. The old list is below.
Last updated April 11, 2009 I am surprised by how well this list held up. The updated NYTimes application is a great improvement over the first version, which I had stopped using, because it was slow and crashed so frequently. I have also added the Amazon Kindle for iPhone application. I still use these apps with some frequency: Google Mobile App, Twitterific, Facebook, Zenbe lists, Remote, Evernote, Amazon and Wikipanion. For restaurant, bar and services information, I still prefer the simpler IWant and Yelp to the flashy Urbanspoon roulette. The upcoming iPhone 3.0 software will eliminate my need for Writeroom, which allows e-mail messaging in landscape mode. As for games, my daughter swears by one new addition, JellyCar, and her favorites, Toybot and de Blob. My fascination with the time-wasting Bejeweled has ebbed, and nothing has really replaced it, unless you count Twitter.
The List Most of the third-party applications on my iPhone were free; none cost more than $9.99. I went a little crazy downloading apps when the store opened on iTunes. Some of them, like the Urbanspoon restaurant roulette app, proved more gimmicky than useful. And they started to drag down the performance. So I have been winnowing the list. Here are the third-party apps I actually open on a regular basis (some of them daily, all of them at least once every couple of weeks), roughly in the order they appear on the phone.
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